Best source for clean pewter? Quality stuff!

[djgoings]

I prefer to purchase solder bars of known content. 50-50 solder you know is 50% tin and 50% lead.

[David2011]

All of the pewter and solder I’ve found was at garage and estate sales. One of the $1.00 rolls of solder was a $110.00 roll (at the time) of Brownell’s gunsmith solder. Never have found any at resale shops yet.

[frkelly74]

Yard sales and estate sales have been the most productive for me. I got 12 big mugs once for $8 Nd will pick up any pewter pieces if I see a $.25 or $.50 sticker on it. I was just putting some torn off pieces of a candle stick in my alloy yesterday. They are like foil wrapped around a bondo like filler so you don't just dump them in whole or you will have a mess. The Salvation Army Store has had a couple of plates but they are not as cheaply priced. Mugs engraved for an event and dated can be had really cheap after the people get divorced or have died. Just saying.

[oley55]

I make it a habit to pop into any Goodwill store I come across. Today I scored a large porcelain plater that had a pewter ring around it for $1.99. I didn’t expect that ring to weigh in at 9.7 ounces! That’s a little over $12 of pewter using Rotometals prices.

[labop]

There are always a lot of ingots for sale on EBay.
labop

[muskeg13]

Ditto on EBay. Search pewter ingot. There's a fellow (edgar) retiring his jewelry business selling 10 and 20 pound ingots and offering free shipping. I've purchased over 60# recently and can vouch that he ships immediately.

[RogerDat]

There can be a tendency to forget how far a pound of pewter will go. Can alloy an awful lot of lead with a just a few pounds of pewter. I have what I need I'm pretty sure and hopefully some I can convert to cash for parts, pieces, and projects. When it comes to pewter I like it as a trade/sale item because it is compact with high value. $60 worth of pewter fits in a SFRB while $60 worth of lead requires a hand truck to take into the post office.

The other thing is I think it is a solemn duty to rescue pewter items from a boring life as a dust collector and insure they are properly recycled into our hobby. Just like printers lead pewter availability as scrounged items will fade. Pewter had a time when it was popular, then became common in yard sales or thrift stores, eventually the supply purchased when popular will be thinned out to just really good items that don't come cheap. Xray lead has had that sort of cycle. Possibly as MRI & CT use has grown, or maybe xray machines no longer require inch thick lead to shield the room. There tends to be a time when an item is widespread in the "waste" stream with the supply fading over time.

Just saying better to scrounge now while the scrounging is at least still decent. Also doesn't hurt to be aware of what is now available as "waste" for cheap that doesn't have more feeding into the new side of the consumer to thrift store to trash cycle. No one is selling actual pewter picture frames, they used to be common. Now they are an aluminum or zinc alloy that looks sort of like pewter. I probably collected 10 lbs. of those pewter frames over time. Haven't seen one in a year before the pandemic year. I doubt the sales and clean outs that tended to deposit that stuff in our path will really come back until post pandemic.

For several years I could count on getting at least one decent priced item per week from a Salvation Army store. Sometimes I would find a few pieces in a visit. Sometimes just one item. Going 2 or 3 times a week over lunch is how I accumulated much of what I have. However for a good while now I just have not seen that stuff available. Only items of a more valuable nature showing up once in a while at the Salvation Army and those are priced way too high.

I'm not going to stop looking but looking ain't the same as finding but one tends to need to be looking in order to have a shot at finding. Scrounging Forever!

[William Yanda]

You could put a "want to buy" ad on craigslist. Something like [ junk pewter must be marked pewter or Zinn XX per pound]. The only problem is many will ask what you want it for and not sell if they find out your casting boolits even if you only target shoot ( I refuse to lie to get something).

I will say I want to smelt it and use it for casting shapes

Buy a sinker mold, tell them you cast lead free sinkers......and ask for a green discount.

[kevin c]

I used to say that I'm interested in casting pewter figurines, because that honestly is something I think interesting and might do someday with the good stock of pewter I planned to and now have collected. It's just that my current interest and use of the pewter is different.